Happy New Year!

So far, so good in 2013. The holiday rush is over, the eating madness has slowed down, at least somewhat...we even managed to stay up past midnight on New Year's Eve! Silly string and bottle rockets are artfully frozen onto our back porch as proof. A few highlights from the holidays at Capra Lane. . .

Our lovely tree is no longer decor, but goat food! They love the needles and bark, pine is like ginger for goats, a gut-calmer. They are not so careful to eat around the sap, their muzzles are sticky and crusted with bits of hay and grain, but they are all smiling.

Ever been on www.dogshaming.com? Basically it is a forum where you can post a pic of your embarrassed dog wearing a sign proclaiming what he did wrong that day. Some of them are quite funny. On Christmas Eve morning I had my own opportunity to nominate one of our mischievous own. The night before I had made a batch of torrone, Italian nougat candy with almonds that is a real pain in the arse to make. After cutting and individually wrapping them I packed up all but a dozen or so to bring to my parents house. A dozen I put in a dish on our dining room table because we were having guests the following night. I woke up to this. . .

That is Tinder's bed. Full of one dozen wrappers!!! The 5 pound chihuahua, not the 80 lb weimaraner, somehow climbed up chairs to the dining room table, carried them one by one to her bed and unwrapped and ate them. She didn't even try to hide the evidence, the little shit!

She raced immediately into the bedroom and climbed in bed with Rog. She hates Rog. Possibly more than I hate birds. Can't you just feel the guilt emanating from those little bug eyes? Surprisingly there were no after effects from eating half her weight in buttery nut candy.

To end 2012 with a bang, we cut the cheese. 3 months of sniffing, turning, panicking all came down to this. We pulled the two small wheels and one large wheel out of the 'cheese cave'. The large one, as we suspected early on, was too wet and full of 'undesirables' and smelled a little like feet. And death. After disposing of it we cut a small wheel. Everyone stood back, half expecting it to explode, or creatures to crawl out of it, or for it to deflate like the turkey on Christmas Vacation. We bravely sliced down the center and saw this. . .

It was beautiful! Angels were singing, the goats were rejoicing, the sky filled with rainbows and unicorns and shooting stars. We took the next reasonable step. . . we made our husbands taste it. When they asked for seconds, we tasted it too. Not too bad for rookies! The rind is inedible and scary, but the cheese itself is nutty, buttery, salty and firm. I could lie and say I taste the terror of the land, the homegrown alfalfa, the kelp, but I'd be lying. It was good but in my head I was still a little worried about botulism to analyze it furthur. We'd set out to make a tomme, an un-cheddared cheddar, but ended up with this, something reminiscent of a goat parmigianno. Now that we have at least partial success, we are anxious to move forward. So much so that we don't want to wait until spring, soon I'll try to get a hold of some fresh raw cow's milk and try again.

Mystery meat quiz. . . winner gets a ....squirrel nugget! In the past I've only prepared squirrel in squirrel-pot-pie so this time we went the more purist route. Yes, we eat squirrel. No I'm not a drug user. Yes, I realize  it is a rodent and our freezers are stocked with 'normal' meat like chicken, beef, pork, venison and goat. The squirrel reached our table this weekend after a friends' 6 year old had his first hunt here with his dad and Rog, which resulted in one fat squirrel. Carrying the squirrel home, cleaning it, skinning it and repurposing the hide helped him to realize that meat isn't made in the store. It came from somewhere, from something that was hunted or killed by someone to provide food.

A lot of us refuse to entertain a world that requires people to hunt and fish to survive. However, this was the fact of life for most of human existence, only more recently has farming / agriculture technology allowed us to eat a variety of meats without having to chase after them first. Teaching hunting to children as not just a sport, but as necessity can also induce a sense of reverence for the meat they consume. Learning to hunt wild game will inadvertently teach the child about the behavioral habits of the chosen target, the necessity of controlling the population of predatory species as well as a respect for nature in general. During the brief and successful squirrel hunt, Sam learned about proper handling of a weapon, to respect the animal that was killed by not wasting it by killing simply for sport but by using the meat to feed our families, secondly, cleaning and tanning the hide for warmth and thirdly, he gained confidence by being able to provide this to his siblings and parents.  He is 6, after all, the highlight of the whole experience was being promised the fluffy tail that will someday adorn his cub scouts cap!